On the local quotient structure of Artin stacks

We show that near closed points with linearly reductive stabilizer, Artin stacks are formally locally quotient stacks by the stabilizer. We conjecture that the statement holds étale locally and we provide some evidence for this conjecture. In particular, we prove that if the stabilizer of a point is linearly reductive, the stabilizer acts algebraically on a miniversal deformation space, generalizing the results of Pinkham and Rim. We provide a generalization and stack-theoretic proof of Luna’s étale slice theorem which shows that GIT quotient stacks are étale locally quotients stacks by the stabilizer.